The Lousiest Fitting, Most Poorly Molded kit you have ever Tried to build

Mach 2 PBM. Horrible thing. Clear parts made out of dried dog drool.

Mach 2 Valiant bomber. And of course after I finished it Airfix came out with a decent one.

Bill

This is an old Monogram B-58. I put this model on the Shelf of Doom for a year before I finally finished it.

F-15C MSIPII by Academy. Pieces fit, but they were just "off" and Deluxe Putty is to thick to really fit in the gaps.  

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 Dragons one and only known 1/35th attemp of a Scud missle launcher....neat concept of subassembly process however each subassembky was designed by a different set of measurements...in different factories...and IF I hazard a guess on different continents.

    Axles had no hard points to frame, frame was warped, cab, launch cabin, and aft sponsons flat did not fit on akready mentioned warped frame.

   Ultimately the 5yr old mind overroad the 22yr old builder and it became the best 40.00 I ever smashed.

A few that have hit my radar as "total waste of glue".

Glencoe reissued a bunch of ancient ITC/Ringo/Ideal kits from the 1950s in the early 1990s. A pair of the Soviet armor kits, the amphibious PT-76 and FROG missile launcher were very poor kits. But they were mainly for nostalgia and not serious model kist.

Around 1999, Trumpeter released an M60A1/A3 under the brand name Wasan. This kit was a poor copy of the Tamiya/Academy kits. Many parts were molded on in place. The entire upper hull looked like it had been put under a heat lamp. It used copies of the other companies' directions, showing the placement of parts that didn't exist because they were molded in place.

The final kit was an old USSR model kit of the Soviet WW2 light tank T-60. Another very crude model that didn't fit anywhere. It was illegal to sell it outside of the USSR. Yeah, it should have disappeared like the Soviet Union.

STARFIX.  Nuff said.

Oh ya, and Mach Poo.

For me it was a Maquette kit of a Boeing 307.  The fuselage did not look like styrene, it looked more like composition or bakelite.  The wings were styrene.  The right side of the fuselage was about 1/8 inch taller than the left.  I pitched it.

It's kind of hard to look back over 50 years of modeling and remember some of the bad kits. I've slept since then and my memory is not what it used to be. So I may not highlight a specific kit, but I do remember some.

I will start off saying anything made by Linberg,... anything.

In general any 70's era Revell, MPC, or AMT automobile kits. The ones with the plastic tire halves. Some were so bad the box top photo was retouched to make the model look better than it actually was. One that comes to mind was an old 1/25 Revell or MPC Anglia gasser drag cars. Revell's 1/12 Ferrari F40 was another kit where everything was warped or designed by the three blind mice.

Some aircraft I found that while neat subjects had serious fit and accuracy issues in my opinion include the 1/48 Revell/Monogram P61 Black Widow, 1/24 Airfix AV8 Harrier, and the XB-70 in 1/72 by AMT/Testors. 

Now armor kits that qualify (IMHO) would be the early Monogram 1/35 Flak Panzer, 1/35 Revell Kfz251 German Rocket Launcher, and I have to agree with the previously stated 1/35 Dragon SCUD-B kits. 

Ben / DRUMS01

Not long after I got back into modeling I saw a neat little mine-roller called a  Minenraumer. It was made by RPM. I had never heard of them but it looked like a cool little build so I ordered one. When I got it the first thing I see is major warpage on parts of the body. Long story short, the kit ended up in the recycling bin, but not after more than a little cussing.

Years later, Meng came out with a new version of the Minenraumer and it was an absolute dream to build, so at least there's a happy ending.

Land Rover by, I think, Rewell. Maybe they made this kit on Friday afternoon but it ended up hitting the wall so hard my wife thought something broke the sound barrier in the basement. 

The newer Revell Land Rover is an excellent kit!

missileman2000

For me it was a Maquette kit of a Boeing 307.  The fuselage did not look like styrene, it looked more like composition or bakelite.  The wings were styrene.  The right side of the fuselage was about 1/8 inch taller than the left.  I pitched it.

 

 

Didn't you build a nice one in 1/144? That would be the better choice.

Bill

For me it was <insert name of nearly any Lindberg kit here> in <nearly always some weird-a**> scale.

Fit? For rank amateurs! Accuracy?? We don't need no stinkin' accuracy!!

The sad part being...they've done some really interesting 'outlying' subjects that no one else has...they just (nearly) always do them badly.

I still build 'em. But each major project asks for months of therapy afterward! 

I'm with DRUMS01 on this one. 

1) I tried that RPM Minenraumer too - a singularly terrible experience. I've never encountered a plastic that genuinely weird and awful to work with. I ended up in the garbage in short order.

2) I don't celebrate a company going out of business but Kitty Hawk should have been ashamed of that first generation of kits they put out. I have no idea what their design philosophy was but "let's not bother to ensure that anything in the kit fits together" wasn't much of a business model to build a new company around. I tried their 1/48 MIG-25 PD/PDS Foxbat and it was a miserable experience from the beginning to then end when it ended up in the trash. Absolutely nothing fit right in the slightest. I'm not a rivet counter so inaccurate details don't bother me too much. But someone producing a kit where almost all the fits were terrible bothers me a great deal. I'd like to think that Kitty Hawk could have gotten better but the contempt they obviously had for the buyers of that first generation of their kits indicated that going out of business was the only way they'd learn. Not much sense IMO in putting out new kits of subjects that have been ignored too much if the models turn out to be near-unbuildable even for experienced modelers.

3) Most of the old AMT Star Trek kits can really get under my skin. They've pushed a lot of those ancient molds for far too many years and really need to retire them. I tried the reboxing of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 refit recently and had trouble with it all the way through. Large distortions along the lenght nacelle seams that even a ton of putty couldn't fix. The attachment points for the engine struts to sit in the engineering section were wildly off-level. The viewing port inserts along the rim of the saucer section all sunk inwards too much and needed lots of work to bring them level to the rim surface. AMT couldn't even bother to mention that weights need to be added to the rear near the shuttlecraft bay to prevent the model from leaning forward due to the saucer section wildly out-weighing the aft portion of the ship. All it all it was unpleasant. I didn't bother finishing it and am using it instead as a test bed for airbrush practice. I wish someone else would get in the game and produce some brand-new Star Trek models. AMT's been complacent for far too long and they need someone to come along to give them a good kick in the pants to make them stop it with the ancient, inaccurate, and burnt-out molds they keep using to churn some of their kits out. 

  Must admit to the RPM Minenrimer as well, wow what a HORRIBlE kit for the " average" builder. The Meng kit is light years ahead but is still a bit fiddly, definitly buildabke however.

   As to Thanos I also agree abot the Star Trek kits. Some are very well done while others are abismal at best. Sci- Fi has alot of wiggle room but if you're gonna take the time and money to produce a model kit for retail atleast due some planning and put out a quality product.

My least enjoyable kit was one of Reveogram's P38s.  I am sure it can be made into a great kit, but I quickly ran out of steam for filling all those seams.

I agree that Monogram took a lot of filler but still can be made into a decent model .

This:

https://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/4/t/190319.aspx

The worst kit I've ever started(not sure if I'm ever gonna finish it) is the Collect-Aire 1/48 F-108 Rapier.

Last time I picked it up, the wing cracked at the join. (AGAIN!) It almost went out the second floor window at that point. 

It currently sits on the Shelf of Doom and will likely be the absolute last kit on there that I finish. 

The worst fitting kit I ever tangled with was a Vampire in 1/48-don't recall who made it. Glencoe, maybe? I bought it in a bag at a show, and it turned out to be a short fight because the thing came with two right side fuselage halves. Guess that qualifies as lousy fit. A shame, too. Had a really nice decal sheet. 

Worse yet,what if a beginner buys one of those poor kits and thinks that he or she doesn't have the skill to build them and gives up scale modeling entirely!That would really be bad!

I could never make the Hasegawa 1/48 Tomcat work,complete fail on my part.

ThanosForever

1) I tried that RPM Minenraumer too - a singularly terrible experience. I've never encountered a plastic that genuinely weird and awful to work with. I ended up in the garbage in short order.

2) I don't celebrate a company going out of business but Kitty Hawk should have been ashamed of that first generation of kits they put out. I have no idea what their design philosophy was but "let's not bother to ensure that anything in the kit fits together" wasn't much of a business model to build a new company around. I tried their 1/48 MIG-25 PD/PDS Foxbat and it was a miserable experience from the beginning to then end when it ended up in the trash. Absolutely nothing fit right in the slightest. I'm not a rivet counter so inaccurate details don't bother me too much. But someone producing a kit where almost all the fits were terrible bothers me a great deal. I'd like to think that Kitty Hawk could have gotten better but the contempt they obviously had for the buyers of that first generation of their kits indicated that going out of business was the only way they'd learn. Not much sense IMO in putting out new kits of subjects that have been ignored too much if the models turn out to be near-unbuildable even for experienced modelers.

3) Most of the old AMT Star Trek kits can really get under my skin. They've pushed a lot of those ancient molds for far too many years and really need to retire them. I tried the reboxing of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 refit recently and had trouble with it all the way through. Large distortions along the lenght nacelle seams that even a ton of putty couldn't fix. The attachment points for the engine struts to sit in the engineering section were wildly off-level. The viewing port inserts along the rim of the saucer section all sunk inwards too much and needed lots of work to bring them level to the rim surface. AMT couldn't even bother to mention that weights need to be added to the rear near the shuttlecraft bay to prevent the model from leaning forward due to the saucer section wildly out-weighing the aft portion of the ship. All it all it was unpleasant. I didn't bother finishing it and am using it instead as a test bed for airbrush practice. I wish someone else would get in the game and produce some brand-new Star Trek models. AMT's been complacent for far too long and they need someone to come along to give them a good kick in the pants to make them stop it with the ancient, inaccurate, and burnt-out molds they keep using to churn some of their kits out. 

 

I have the Kitty Hawk 1/48 Russian airfield service trucks. They look nice in the box; hope they don't give me too many fits.

Have you looked at the 1/350 Starship Enterprise refit by Polar Lights? 

Tojo72

I could never make the Hasegawa 1/48 Tomcat work,complete fail on my part.

 

Tojo, I've heard they modified the molds on the later kits to make them more user friendly. Only have one in the stash so I couldn't tell you how much easier it is.(If at all). 

Straycat1911

 

 

Tojo72

I could never make the Hasegawa 1/48 Tomcat work,complete fail on my part.

 

 

 

 

Tojo, I've heard they modified the molds on the later kits to make them more user friendly. Only have one in the stash so I couldn't tell you how much easier it is.(If at all). 

 

Thanks,I recently completed a Tamiya Tomcat,much more fun.

Aww you guys...

I challenge anyone to find more exquisite moldings than these, outside the realm of resin kits produced in caves, with fire heated plastic forced by hand into old rubber molds.

Mach 2.  The best of the best of the best.  With honors, sir.